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Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary

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Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary Carter Mathes Small Axe, Number 32 (Volume 14, Number 2), June 2010, pp. 17-41 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/smx/summary/v014/14.2.mathes.html Access Provided by Rutgers University at 09/10/10 7:35PM GMT Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary Carter Mathes Peace is the diploma you get in the cemetery. —Peter Tosh I remember that during my childhood in Argentina, in the continuous performance cinemas there was an announcement saying, “The performance begins when you arrive.” Well, I think that “emancipation” is the opposite: it is a performance at which we always arrive late and which forces us to guess, painfully, at its mythical or impossible origins. —Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) On 4 July 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta titled “The American Dream.” On a day marking US independence, in a year marked by sharpening critiques of American racial politics, King pointed out how the idea of US citizenship had fallen victim to what he termed the “schizophrenic personality” of the nation: “On the one hand we have proudly professed the great principles of democracy, but on the other hand we have sadly practiced the very opposite of those principles.”1 King contrasted 1 Martin Luther King Jr., “The American Dream” (speech, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 4 July 1965). Transcript and audio available from the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/ encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_american_dream/ (accessed 26 March 2010). small axe 32 • July 2010 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-2010-003 © Small Axe, Inc. 18 | Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary this troubled relationship between American democracy and racial equality against his recent impressions of Jamaican racial pluralism: The other day Mrs. King and I spent about ten days down in Jamaica. Here you have people from many national backgrounds. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” . One day, here in America, I hope that we will see this and we will become one big family of Americans. Not white Americans, not black Americans . but just Americans. One big family of Americans.2 Jamaica became a window into national racial harmony for King, allowing him to project his dream of racial equality in the Unites States through the perceived promise of Jamaican pluralism. King’s vision of post-independence racial politics reflected his belief in the progres- sive evolution of modern societies, his understanding that “if democracy is to live, segregation must die.”3 A more complicated reality existed during this period of the black freedom move- ment in the United States, however, through the heightened radicalization and questioning of nonviolence by Malcom X, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and through the continued de facto seg- regation, poverty, and disillusionment rampant in poor black sections of northern and western cities. Indeed, the more permanent structural features of US racial subjection were becoming increasingly visible. It is important to understand King’s movement to and from Jamaica in the context of this historical juncture, for in spite of King’s view of Jamaican racial harmony, post-independence racial politics far more closely mirrored than superseded the tensions within the United States regarding racial identity and socioeconomic rights. In these early years of Jamaica’s transition between independence from Great Britain in 1962, the rise in black consciousness during the late 1960s, and the experiments with democratic socialism in the 1970s, the political and racial terrain that King entered in 1965 represents an important precursor to the charged national struggles over racial and economic equality that intensified later in the decade and into the 1970s. As these undercurrents of containment mark discourses and events of freedom, independence, and citizenship moving between the United States and Jamaica, I examine the space between the “promise” imagined by King, the starkly different reality of contestation over race in the post-independence years in Jamaica, and the critical intervention of Peter Tosh’s political prophecy offered roughly a decade after King’s visit. I read the resonance of King’s intersection with Jamaican racial politics past his visit, into the 1970s, to consider how the prospect of Jamaica as a beacon for racial transformation becomes exhausted through the intensification of class, racial, and political warfare overtaking the nation by the mid-1970s. Examining this visible shift in Jamai- can racial politics highlights the militant Rastafari dismissal of the Jamaican state projected by Peter Tosh at the One Love Peace Concert in 1978 as part of a subaltern line of critique that 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 32 • July 2010 • Carter Mathes | 19 firmly rejects any claims to social transformation being attainable through ideas of political development and racial respectability. The political and cultural resonance of King as an emis- sary of racial progress with a deepening black radical consciousness and Tosh as Rastafari intellectual using performance and song as modalities of the political fashioned outside of the frequencies of established political discourse upholds, challenges, and complicates the idea of racial progress as an achievement of liberal governance circulating between Jamaica and the United States.4 Echoing the theoretical insights offered by Brent Edwards in his work on diaspora and black internationalism, this essay considers the convergence and space between King and Tosh as one in which dimensions of the black political prophetic imaginary are articulated, that is, framed through a “process of linking or connecting across gaps,” as they operate within and against the accepted avenues of liberal governance that largely guide this period of global racial transformation.5 In bringing these two somewhat disparate figures together, then, I address the following question: how do ideas of black political identity travel between the supposed symbol of emerging racial democracy (the United States) and a nation that has just entered the hemispheric and global stage of modern postcolonial liberal democracy while remaining deeply ambivalent about the degree to which blackness defines national identity (Jamaica)? I. As Obika Gray documents in Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960–1972, the imme- diate post-independence period witnessed a backlash against black consciousness taking hold within the political and economic landscape of the new nation. He quotes a 1963 letter published in the Gleaner to exemplify the way that US civil rights discourse was inverted and wielded as an indictment of black rule in Jamaica. The letter read: All I can now say is, be careful all of you who are teaching race-hatred, lest the present situation in Alabama does not develop here in years to come but with the Chinese and white Jamaicans being victimized. This whole concept now held by many Afro-Jamaicans that Jamaica is a Black Man’s country and Black Man Must Rule no matter what, makes a complete mockery of our motto.6 The motto the writer refers to is of course “Out of Many, One People,” and Gray profiles this writer’s view as a pillar in the ideology of “Jamaican exceptionalism,” a mindset and practice that upheld a color-blind meritocracy alongside the myth of cross-racial harmony as the basis 4 It is interesting to observe that the way King’s relationship to Jamaica has more recently been noted reflects a tone of longing for this past in which Jamaica was idealized by King as a model of racial advancement. See, for example, Henley Morgan, “If We Could See Ourselves as Others See Us,” Jamaica Observer, 17 May 2007; and Martin Henry, “King Loved Ja, Ja Loved King,” Gleaner, 25–31 January 2007, North American edition. 5 Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11. 6 Letter to the editor, Gleaner, 8 October 1963; quoted in Obika Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960–1972 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 85 (ellipsis in original). 20 | Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary for Jamaican national identity, downplaying the complicated history of race and power that had brought the one-time colony to independence.7 Gray’s work on the relationship between race, nation, and political struggle during this period critically examines historical narratives of liberalism, freedom, nationalism, and racial formation within what Anthony Bogues recognizes as certain “complexities of the nature of the Jamaican state and both the colonial and Creole nationalist project of constructing a particular Afro-Jamaican subject.”8 This construction of national subjects in accordance with ideas of “new world” hemispheric modern political order, ideas that themselves were indelibly shaped by the context of early modern conquest and capitalism, point to an “internal paradox of liberal freedom,” that, as theorized by David Scott,
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